Ian Tindale wrote in message ...

But how do the weekly season tickets work? Are they some sort of blanket
'I've paid' signal that last a whole week? I'd have thought the same sort
of system would work for an off-peak one day travelcard* that simply says
'I've paid, let me through' and the oyster reader says 'is it after 9:30?

If you buy the peak travelcard in advance it will work as you suggest.
But in my example the passenger had not and it was upto the capping
system to work out that he/she should have done that to get the
cheepest fare for the days travel, rather than paying for the journeys
seperatly, then refund the excess prepay spent so they only ended up
paying for the peak travelcard even though he/she didn't buy one to
start with.

yep, okay'. Capping sounds complicated, whereas a straightforward off-peak

I don't think anyone will disagree with that!

one day travelcard itself that works in the same way as a weekly (ie, don't
need to plonk on the reader on the way in or out of the station, but
nevertheless registers as valid when the driver comes up and inspects your
ticket) sounds quite simple in concept.

To bring this back to the subject of this thread, I agree if you
ignore prepay than there is no reason why it could not be set up very
quickly - it's just a shorter validity version of the tickets already
available. However the lack of the one day travelcards/tickets on
Oyster makes a nice excuse for capping not to be available - after all
Oyster does not do day tickets so it can't cap the prepay fares down
to them


* Certainly not a peak - what's the point in such a minority-use ticket -
costs too much - never ever used one, never heard of anyone else paying for
one either.

If you need a travelcard for the day - but your first tube journey is
during the morning peek it is cheeper to get a peak day travelcard
than to buy a single then an off-peak travelcard in most (all?) cases.

--
Gareth Davis